New Site - Link Penalty Notification

jaffstar

A site we work on went live 1 months ago. It only has 16 domains pointing to it. Most of these links are redirects from old domains or links that the client obtained.

They received the dreaded Google mail warning about un-natural links.

The site was not banned...and is still getting traffic.

Should they contact the 16 domains and request removal ?

They are directories, some do have 10+ links pointing to the domain.

Could Google send a false message?

What are your thoughts?

Planet13

7:23 pm on Jul 2, 2012 (gmt 0)

Personally, I would get rid of those backlinks ASAP, especially if the anchor text is exact match.

CainIV

9:03 pm on Jul 3, 2012 (gmt 0)

I would remove all links immediately as well and send reinclusion to Google.

blackpixel

9:15 pm on Jul 3, 2012 (gmt 0)

Remove them and ask for reinclusion, directory links are a big NO NO in recent google algo.

Lame_Wolf

1:54 pm on Jul 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

directory links are a big NO NO in recent google algo.

Not true. Having links from non-related directories are not good to have, and nor are free-for-all types, but it has been that way long before these recent algos.

mhansen

2:09 pm on Jul 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

This is the problem Google has created... Why do anything specifically to appease Google? If the links are beneficial to the site and visitors, why change them?

Are the directories relevant? Do they get clicks from the directory visitors? If so, I would leave them in place. That's like penalizing a B&M business for having yellow page listings!

Are the old domains relevant to the business? Are they former domains they used to operate? Why remove the 301's? What service are you doing for actual visitors who bookmarked that old .com address if you just leave them in dead-space?

On the other hand... if these links were created specifically to game search results, then the warning in WMT is probably a good reflection of the truth.

directory links are a big NO NO in recent google algo

I disagree. If the directories are relevant and moderated, they may not carry much weight, but I haven't seen them hurt either. If they are FFA (free for all) directories, that's another story. From what we see, relevance and a editorial process is what matters.

blackpixel

9:04 pm on Jul 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

I think it's all about link profile, and if a new site gets the first bunch of links and majority of them are directory links - it looks unnatural.

jaffstar

1:59 pm on Jul 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Earlier this year, Google revealed that we sent out over 700,000 messages to site owners in January and February 2012 via our free webmaster console athttp://google.com/webmasters . I wanted to clarify a misconception about those messages. A lot of people assumed that most or all of the 700K messages were related to "unnatural link warnings" that some site owners received.

The reason for sending the 700,000 messages via Webmaster Tools was actually because we started sending out warnings about blackhat techniques. The vast, vast majority of manual actions we take are on pages that are engaging in egregious blackhat SEO techniques, such as automatically created gibberish or cloaking.

In fact, of the messages that we sent out to site owners, only around 3% were for unnatural or artificial links. So just to be clear, of the 700,000 messages we sent out in January and February, well above 600,000 were for obvious blackhat spam, and under 25,000 of the messages were for unnatural links. #smx #seo

This was posted by Matt Cutts.

I believe the site could of triggered something NOT due to links...

CainIV

6:02 am on Jul 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

If you received a manual unnatural links penalty message then you can be sure that this is exactly what the issue is. There might be other problems, but until you remove poor links and re-include it will be very difficult to reach page one google for any keywords